Reply to Wall Street Journal on rampant growth in percentage of college students with “disabilities”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People with disabilities aren't inherently inferior to you.  Using a computer instead of a pencil to type an essay isn't cheating any more than using a ramp instead of the stairs is cheating. [b] Having simply average working memory isn't going to make a surgeon botch a surgery. [/b] Using a calculator isn't going to doom an engineer into a life of professional ineptitude.  Having dyslexia doesn't mean that a writer won't become a best seller or a financier won't succeed so wildly that he becomes a household name.  Having ADHD and dropping out of college doesn't mean a person won't create a start up and become filthy rich.  And a single test that arbitrarily penalizes anyone with atypical strengths and weaknesses in no way justifies withholding future opportunities from that individual.
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Visual working memory is important to performing surgery. It's been studied in simulators.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00464-007-9287-8

It's dangerous to make claims consistent with what you want to believe that are not consistent with the pushback of reality.[/quote]

"Low" working memory in most cases is relative to the person's strengths.  I think it's a fairly safe assumption that someone who succeeds in the medical field has a high overall intelligence.  Two standard deviations between working memory and their strengths would still put working memory at average if not high average.  Your study shows that someone like this may not be as skilled in certain types of surgery as peers with superior or gifted range working memory.  It does not show that they would botch surgery.  Botched surgeries have much more to do with poor team dynamic and communication.
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I don't think you have performed surgery, then.[/quote]

Of course not.  I'm an engineer.  But I can read and I know the source of CRM.  You really, really want to define people by their weakest areas alone and moreover you only want to talk about weak areas that impact testing.  I'm saying that first, areas of strength can more than make up for areas of weaknesses and second, the areas of weakness that you're talking about are not the dominating factor.  People with no IQ subtest disparities botch surgeries all the time because of those weaknesses, but strangely you don't want to talk about that.
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